Halliday & Matthiessen (1999: 425):
On the West Coast, a number of linguists have developed a "cognitive" alternative to generative linguistics. Some of them (e.g., Lakoff, Langacker) come from a generative background (Lakoff s starting point was generative semantics), but have made a radical departure from this tradition. They have widened the scope of study relative to the generativist research agenda so as to include metaphor as a prominent feature (Lakoff & Johnson, 1980, and other subsequent writings, such as Lakoff, 1987, 1988) and a detailed theoretical model of the relationship of language to cognition and perception (Langacker, 1987). A few have also oriented their work towards discourse (notably Chafe, e.g. 1979; 1987; cf. also Tomlin's, 1987a, discussion of the linguistic reflection of cognitive events).This version of cognitive semantics is arguably more closely associated with the rhetorical and ethnographic tradition (perhaps not so much in terms of its roots, but in terms of where it is headed); cognitive anthropology, with its interest in folk taxonomy and more recently in cultural models, provides a meeting point between the two.Various aspects of the West Coast work in cognitive semantics are relevant to the organisation of the ideation base; for example, the work on metaphorical systems already mentioned, Talmy's (e.g. 1985) work on lexicalisation, and Chafe's (1970) early work on the organisation of meaning.